Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief

At the intersection of experience and belief

One day, well over 40 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri de coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind, and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience.  Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely.  I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical, and paranormal nature.

A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation.  I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love.  I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone.  Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do. 

The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition.  He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.

Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described  as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent.  Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief.  Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term.  But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was Christ’s love, that would be an overbelief.  The experience itself could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, years after having the experience, I also have no practical doubts about its occurrence:  I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories. 

Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality.  There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open.  First, is it of something real?  Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of? 

Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain."  But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd.  The experience was certainly not of that.  The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.

Indeed, the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word James uses on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience. If an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading into an experience more than is contained in it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained in it, or reading out of it what manifestly is not contained in it. 

Answering a skeptic, however, does not amount to a proof of the veridicality of an experience. 

We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions.  Are there perceptual beliefs?  If yes, are they not overbeliefs?  I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me.  But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes.  The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .

Or is it rather underbelief  if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality apart from my visual perception?

Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?

Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief?  Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective?  Beliefs are either true or false.  Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences.  I think James would reject this.  For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs. 

Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation.  But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief.  One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses.  The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object.  That must be granted.  It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self.  To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real.  How justify that principle on the basis of a close inspection of experience?  It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance.  Are we acquainted with it?

The irony shouldn't be missed.  Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self.  Buddhism is a religion.